| The French Enlightenment represents a unique episode in the history of post-classical philosophy: a moment, poised between the decline of the medieval university and the rise of the modern academic philosophy department, when philosophical knowledge was produced largely outside specialized and learned intellectual communities. Throughout this period, savants began to seek out audiences beyond the scholarly correspondence networks and societies established in the previous century, tailoring their publications for a general reading public and working to establish themselves within the glittering aristocratic world of the Parisian salons. This dissertation examines how these developments transformed the practice of philosophy as a scholarly enterprise.; I explore this general theme through a case study, focusing on the career of the Parisian metaphysician and pedagogue Etienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714-1780). Like so many of his contemporaries, Condillac sought to bring the fruits of his learning to salon sophisticates and the general public, but he also continued to adhere to an older model of philosophy as a technical, scholarly enterprise, demanding a certain amount of expertise. These two ambitions proved difficult to reconcile, and Condillac's publications sometimes provoked harsh criticism from his contemporaries. Throughout his life, therefore, Condillac struggled to adapt to the demands placed upon him by his audiences, while simultaneously seeking to devise ways of training them to become more learned readers of philosophy.; Studying these interactions between Condillac and his readers allows me to explore two broader issues. On the one hand, I analyze how the experience of writing philosophy outside of learned communities transformed the cultural identity of the philosopher during this period. In particular, I look at shifting assumptions about the proper scope of philosophy and about the nature and value of philosophical expertise. At the same time, I also examine how these developments shaped eighteenth-century philosophical practices: that is, the scholarly activities central to the philosopher's craft. In particular, I focus on techniques for reading and evaluating texts, taking notes, acquiring knowledge, engaging in disputes, cultivating audiences, crafting written expositions, building theories, and teaching concepts and techniques to others. Historians of philosophy rarely pay much attention to these kinds of practices, but they also have a history, and they often shape the production of philosophical knowledge in profound ways. By focusing on collective identities and practices, rather than on the ideas and doctrines of individuals, this dissertation offers a new kind of cultural approach to the history of Enlightenment philosophy, modeled on the history of science.; Each chapter begins with one of Condillac's own practices or texts, or with a controversy in which he was involved, and then builds outwards, reconstructing its place within a larger community of philosophers and readers. Chapters 1 and 2 consider the highly publicized plagiarism dispute that erupted over Condillac's Traite des sensations in 1754, using this episode to explore the shifting cultural identity of the philosopher at mid-century. Chapter 3 focuses on the 1749 Traite des systemes , and analyzes Condillac's efforts to train lay readers in the art of reading and evaluating philosophical texts. Chapter 4 looks at the pedagogical and writerly strategies employed by Condillac and other eighteenth-century scholars in an effort to manage the reception of their works and considers the epistemological effects of these practices on philosophical theories. Chapter 5 explores the encyclopedic ambitions of eighteenth-century philosopher, and describes some of the shared tools that they developed to facilitate their efforts to theorize about every branch of knowledge. |
